Aussiedler and Other Immigrants
2.6 Discussion of Findings and Conclusion
This chapter has explored why the age at which minor-aged individuals immigrate influences education outcomes and in how far different social groups among immigrant children are affected to the same degree. Looking at persons who change from one national education system to another makes the power the institutions of national life course regimes exert on individuals visible. Hence, my analysis complements the internationally comparative life course research which reveals the influence of varying state institutions, too. The particularity of the German school system, especially the early tracking into stratified school types, explains why older immigrants have a high risk of attaining less valuable certificates (or none at all).
Following the institutional logic, children aged 10 years or older upon arrival have to be sorted into one of the different tracks. The way this sorting takes place is pre-structured by the concentration of preparatory measures at low-track schools and the lack thereof at high-track schools. Empirically, this analysis has focused on individuals who immigrated as minors to Germany during the more recent immigrant waves (1987–2003) and studied the kind of certificate they attained at the end of their school careers.
Before discussing the results, some remarks on the limitations of the data seem appropriate: First, with the cross sectional data at hand, it is not possible to illumi-nate the educational pathways between being routinely placed in the Hauptschule and the final degree attained. Recalling the statistics in North Rhine-Westphalia (four in five immigrants began their school career in the low-track school), we can assume that at least some teenage immigrants succeeded in moving to higher tracks – against the general trend of downward mobility during secondary education in Germany. Second, it remains desirable for future studies to carefully distinguish between school certificates attained in Germany, certificates attained abroad and foreign certificates formally recognized by German authorities as equivalent to the German ones. This distinction could not be made in the Mikrozensus data used here, but could be particularly important when studying the educational and economic integration processes of immigrants who arrive in the sensitive phase of being older teenagers/young adults.20
My empirical results showed that for the 1.5-generation immigrants studied here there is indeed a negative correlation between age at migration and their educational attainment as all theories predict. However, differentiating this group by the level of parental education and the mode of governmental incorporation – positive (Aussiedler) versus neutral/negative (other immigrants) – revealed a more
20Thirdly, the results presented here only capture the educational attainment of immigrants who remained in Germany until 2005 excluding those who attended German schools only for a number of years and left Germany again before 2005. As many ex-Yugoslavian refugees and other refugees denied asylum had to leave, this socially selective outmigration probably leads to a rosier picture of those who stayed – however it is unclear whether the strength of the age-at migration effect is affected.
detailed picture. Contrary to my initial assumption that social or political advantages help alleviate the negative effect of a higher age at migration, the analysis revealed the – seemingly – opposite result: The more privileges a subgroup enjoys, the stronger the age-at-migration effect.
These unexpected results call for an explanation of two phenomena: Why does the timing of immigration exert such a strong negative influence on Aussiedler despite privileges they enjoy? And why does an early age at migration not entail the expected educational advantages among the non-German immigrants, especially those who could not rely on their parents’ cultural capital?
As to the first question: In the history of Aussiedler-specific integration policies some education-related programs can be identified. However, these programs were not substantive enough to help Aussiedler-students achieve the more prestigious secondary-education certificates more easily than other immigrants. The govern-mental discrimination of immigrants according to their legal status primarily took place outside the education system, ranging from the security of status, access to the labor market, financial transfers, and German-language courses for adult Aussiedler to the general acceptance of this particular migration flow. And yet, the favorable life circumstances resulting from the accumulation of such privileges obviously did not protect Aussiedler youths from the downgrading processes connected with rising age at migration – as educated backgrounds do not protect immigrant children from failing at school when they immigrate during secondary education. The institutional logics of the school system, i.e. early tracking as well as German language requirements and lack of German language training in the Gymnasium, partially override the non school-related determinants of educational attainment.
Whereas the role of early tracking into hierarchically-ordered secondary schools has often been discussed in its relevance for the reproduction of social inequality (OECD 2005: 56–58; Solga 2005: 139–142; K¨oller and Baumert 2001: 106), my results complement these analyses by underlining the additional detrimental effect this institutional “sorting machine” (Kerckhoff1995) has on the educational opportunities of teenage immigrants. When young people come from abroad and enter the school system of the host country after the usual sorting has taken place, these newcomers stand a risk of being relegated to the lowest tier, no matter what non-school related advantages they might otherwise enjoy. This downward-leveling effect is an additional, immigrant-specific penalty of early tracking.
While the status of Aussiedler did not serve as shield against the educational risks of immigrating during secondary education, we did not find a significant impact of age at migration on the educational attainment of the other immigrants, none of whom enjoyed legal-political privileges to the same extent as Aussiedler.
This does not in turn mean that non-Aussiedler were exempted from the neg-ative effect of immigrating as a teenager. Rather, the relevant question, which challenges traditional views on the age-at-migration effect, is why non-Aussiedler immigrant children did not profit from an early age at migration. To a certain extent this unexpected result may reflect that school-leaving certificates are a rather crude indicator (though in this crudeness highly influential for the subsequent life course). If information about grades or competence measures were available,
an age-at-migration effect might become visible. But this still would not explain why so many of those non-German immigrants who immigrated at an early age ended up in the low-track secondary schools.
The Aussiedler population could apparently exhaust the ‘objective’ advantages connected with an early age at migration.21 As argued above, this finding cannot be attributed to any Aussiedler-specific interventions in kindergartens and primary schools. Rather, the (non-school related) advantages of their privileged governmen-tal mode of incorporation seem to have exerted their positive effect on educational careers mainly if the Aussiedler child enrolled in a German school well before tracking takes place. Hence, for disadvantaged students, one can conclude that the mainstream educational institutions – even if entered at an early age – were unable to compensate for accumulated disadvantages of life circumstances many non-Aussiedler immigrant children faced outside the sphere of education. And exclusionary immigrant policies targeted at politically unwanted immigrants like asylum seekers were partly responsible for these underprivileged living situations of immigrant families.
The finding that Germany’s pre-school and primary-education institutions are unable to compensate for disadvantaging backgrounds – in this case of newly arrived immigrant children – again underlines criticism of the role of the institutional features of German schools for the reproduction of social inequality in general. The restricted learning-time of German ‘half-day schools’ for instance – teaching usually ends at noon – renders parental assistance during the rest of the day particularly influential, and the unequal distribution of educationally relevant resources among parents thus takes its toll (Solga2005: 141; Steinbach and Nauck2004: 27).
The fact that German educational institutions have proven unable to compensate for their students’ underprivileged backgrounds pertains to a range of factors, language training being of particular importance: Until recently, kindergarten staff was neither trained in teaching German as a second/foreign language, nor did pre-school education offer any systematic language training. In primary education (just as in secondary schools), German lessons have been offered, but on an underfinanced ad-hoc base. German as a second language has so far not been an integral part of the general teacher training at German universities. Hence, the quality of German-language teaching at German schools is rather questionable.
The potential of effectively imparting the necessary linguistic competences on immigrant students within the schools has certainly not yet been exhausted.
Nevertheless, the event of migration will always be a challenge to the individual.
Latecomers in a national life course regime have less time to reach similar goals as natives. And yet, if the German education system were less selective, better equipped with resources to help children and youth of any age group to learn
21Another multivariate model not shown here reveals that among immigrant youths arriving during secondary education the specific governmental mode of incorporation plays no significant role, while among younger immigrant children, the privileged Aussiedler status exerts the positive influenced visible in the main model (Table2.1).
German effectively, and offered more learning time within schools in order to make up for disadvantaged family backgrounds, the negative effect of age at migration could – as a by-product of such fundamental political reforms – be mitigated as well, at least to a similar extent as in more inclusive national education systems.
2.A.1 Appendix
Table 2.A.1 Bivariate distribution of educational attainment by the independent variables No
No certificate 13:4 47.7 20.6 18.4 147 10:7
Low-level certificate 5:1 43.9 24.3 26.8 592 38:1
Mid-level certificate 2:1 28.0 35.8 34.1 422 25:9
High-level certificate 3:2 13.2 22.1 61.4 386 25:3
Legal status upon arrival***
Non-German migrant
8:3 36.1 19.3 36.4 600 44:0
Aussiedler 1:9 29.5 31.9 36.7 957 56:0
Gender***
Male 5:3 39.2 23.6 31.9 835 54:9
Female 4:0 24.1 29.6 42.4 722 45:1
Occupational status of father/single mother***
Self-employed 8:6 20.8 12.7 57.9 75 4:9
White-collar 1:9 19.9 24.7 53.6 244 15:4
Blue collar 3:7 34.0 30.7 31.6 869 54:2
Unemployed 8:0 38.9 20.2 32.9 367 25:5
(continued)
Table 2.A.1 (continued)
Regional state by overall-share of low-track schools***
Under-average
Large town 5:6 25:0 23:6 45:8 460 30:5
Medium-sized town 2:8 32:5 27:3 37:4 565 36:0
Small town/village 5:9 39:1 27:7 27:3 532 33:4
Total 4:72 32:38 26:31 36:59 100
N (not weighted) 61 506 418 572 1; 557
Source: German Mikrozensus 2005 (FDZ); own calculation; weighted percentages Note: See note of Table2.1for the definition of the immigrant sample
Significance levels: ***p<0.001; **p<0.01; *p<0.05;Cp<0.10
aNorth Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Lower Saxony, (West-) Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen
bBavaria, Baden-W ¨urttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland
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